Degrees

Teaching Experience

Harvard University; College of the Holy Cross

Specialties

Ancient Christianity

Interests

Ancient Christian pilgrimage, icons, relics, monasticism

Other

My research centers on the role of bodies, places, and pictures in the ancient Christian imagination during the fourth through sixth centuries. This was a transitional and transformative time for ancient Christians (and new converts), as the previously banned religion became a religion tied to imperial power.

I am most interested in how Christians understood their relation to the material world. Can places be holy? Can the body be trusted or somehow trained to perceive or even reveal God? These questions are at the heart of The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity (2000), which explores the role of the senses in early Christian pilgrims’ writings about their encounters with desert monastics and the biblical past.

Since the book, my attention has shifted from those who left home (e.g., pilgrims and monastics) to those who stayed put, namely, preachers and ordinary Christians. A central figure in my recent work is Romanos the Melodist, a sixth-century preacher from Constantinople. His sung sermons performed on feast days retold biblical events giving speech to new or neglected figures (e.g., Judas, the Virgin Mary, Peter, Satan, even personifications of Death).

I present my work in conferences on Early Christianity, Art History, Byzantine Studies, and Classics in the United States, France, Israel, and Britain.

Publications

Published:

“Memory and Forgetting in Romanos the Melodist’s ‘On the Newly Baptized,’” in Between Personal and Institutional Religion: Self, Doctrine, and Practice in Late Antique Eastern Christianity. Edited by Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony and Lorenzo Perrone. Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages series (Y. Hen, general editor). Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. Pp. 37-55.

“The Memory Palace of Marcellinus: Athanasius and the Mirror of the Psalms,” in Ascetic Culture: Essays in Honor of Philip Rousseau. Edited by Blake Leyerle and Robin Darling Young. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. 97-124.

“Telling Jerusalem: Miracles and the Moveable Past in Late Antique Christianity,” in Objects in Motion: The Circulation of Religion and Sacred Objects in the Late Antique and Byzantine World. Edited by Hallie Meredith. British Archaeological Reports International Series 2247. Oxford: Archaeopress, 2011. Pp. 49-54.

“Death in the Flesh: Picturing Death’s Body and Abode in Late Antiquity,” in Looking Beyond: Visions, Dreams and Insights in Medieval Art and History. Edited by Colum Hourihane. State Park, Penn.; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Pp. 58-74.

"The Image in Tandem: Painting Metaphors and Moral Discourse in Late Antique Christianity." In The Subjective Eye: Essays in Culture, Religion, and Gender in Honor of Margaret R. Miles. Edited by Richard Valantasis et al.

"Romanos and the Night Vigil in the Sixth Century." In A People's History of Christianity, vol. 3: Byzantine Christianity. Ed. by Derek Krueger. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2006. Pp. 59-78.

"Dialogue and Deliberation: The Making of the Sensory Self in the Hymns of Romanos the Melodist." In Religion and the Self in Antiquity. Ed. by David Brakke, Steve Weitzman, and Michael Satlow. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2005. Pp. 163-79.

"'Taste and See': The Eucharist and the Eyes of Faith in the Fourth Century," Church History 70 (2001): 619-43.

The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrims to Living Saints in Christian Late Antiquity. (Transformation of the Classical Heritage, 30; Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

"Macrina's Scar: Homeric Allusion and Heroic Identity in Gregory of Nyssa's Life of Macrina, "Journal of Early Christian Studies 8 (2000): 511-30

"The Pilgrim's Gaze in the Age before Icons," in Visuality before and beyond the Renaissance. Edited by Robert S. Nelson. (Cambridge Studies in New Art History and Criticism; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 98-115

"Miracles, Monks, and Monuments: The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto as Pilgrims' Tales" in Pilgrimage and Holy Space in Late Antique Egypt, David Frankfurter, ed. (REligions in the Greco-Roman World; Leiden: Brill, 1998), 483-505

Dissertation

"The Memory of the Eyes: Pilgrimage to Desert Ascetics in the Christian East during the Fourth and Fifth Centuries"
Advisers: Susan Ashbrook Harvey (Brown University); Helmut Koester, Margaret Miles (Harvard)

Professional Experience

Anonymous reader for Patristic Monograph Series - University of California Press, Oxford University Press, University of North Carolina Press, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Spiritus

Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity, Society of Biblical Literature, Steering Committee member (2005-2008)